When we think of organizational records, we usually think of paper, emails and legal contracts. We don’t often consider film and other A/V material that is created in the course of business. Radio and television stations, for instance, record their broadcasts not only as evidence of their business—the recording ‘fixes’ their work so that it may be protected under copyright and other intellectual property legislation, but also for their research value. In fact, many broadcasters rely on revenue generated from licensing their material as part of their business model. Even CBC makes a few dollars each year licensing clips to documentary filmmakers and other secondary users. It is my understanding that their most valuable footage is of the 1972 Hockey Summit Series between Russia and Canada.
Not all media companies, however, have been so careful about keeping their film or audio material. Canada’s British counterpart, the BBC, wiped (junked) a lot of their videotapes between 1967 and 1978 to make room for newer programmes. Unfortunately, the BBC had no central archives at the time and the engineers who junked the tapes were unaware that they included master video for several popular TV shows, including Doctor Who and the Avengers. Luckily, Doctor Who had such a fanatical following that many of the episodes had been recorded on home VHS recorders; BBC Enterprises recorded others onto 16mm for commercial exploitation abroad. The broadcaster put out an open call to the public seeking copies of the show and was able to recover most of the missing episodes; however, the quality will never match the lost masters. 108 Episodes remain missing to this day. You can read more about the missing BBC shows here.
I’m thinking about the importance of audio-visual records today for two reasons.
First, I finally sat down this week and watched the restored version of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis, which I somehow missed when it was released in theatres last year. The restored version included 20 minutes of film thought to be missing since the film’s original release in 1927. Paula Felix-Didier of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, Argentina discovered the long-lost footage in her museum archives during a shelf read. You can listen to an interview with Felix-Didier on the NPR website here.
Then today, I caught an article in the Toronto Star about the recovery of 16mm reels of the 1960 Yankees-Pirates World Series games that had been stored in Bing Crosby’s longtime home near San Francisco. Crosby was a part owner of the Pirates from 1946 until his death in 1977. The current vice president of Bing Crosby Enterprises found the tapes recently when he was searching for reels and tapes of Crosby’s old TV specials. What makes this find so exciting is that the original footage of the games was destroyed by NBC and no other copies were known to exist. In addition, Crosby stored the footage in his wine cellar, which had perfect environmental conditions for preserving film. Yaay Bing! Now, the games have been transferred to DVD and will be made available for sale later this fall.
How do you know what to keep and what to tape over? Maybe NBC didn’t see the historical or commercial value of live baseball once the broadcast was finished? Would a records retention program have helped BBC avoid a glut of tapes in the library that forced them to junk master footage to make room for new shows? Maybe a proper indexing system would have prevented the loss of loaned reels of Metropolis for more than 70 years. And the $10,000 question: how do you preserve audio-visual material when formats change so frequently? I guess the first step is to recognize the importance of film and audio records for their evidence, information, and commercial value.
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